Back to the future in Marrakech

Esther Freud, whose childhood in the city inspired her novel Hideous Kinky, is struck by its new sophistication

It’s more than 50 years since I first visited Marrakech, having driven across Europe with my mother and an assortment of her friends, and on to the ferry at Algeciras, only to be towed to the gates of this ancient, pink walled city in our finally broken-down van. It had been a momentous journey and it warranted we stay: weeks, months, a year, more. My fifth birthday was celebrated, and then my sixth. Soon it was all I knew, and our eventual relocation to East

Sussex was a shock. Britain was closed, or so it seemed, lives lived privately behind locked doors. Did my silent neighbours know there was a place that teemed with scooters and donkeys, carts piled high with strawberries, shops selling pyramids of spices, kaftans, babouches, cows’ stomachs, hooves? That all day, and late into the night, people worked, drank tea and ate, outside? All through those years I kept Morocco alive. I dreamt about it, and talked about it, until my school nickname became “In Mowocco”, and I learnt to keep quiet.

I was in my mid-20s when, casting around for an idea in a creative writing class, I described a camel festival I’d attended, packed into a donkey’s saddlebag as it made its perilous way along a mountain path, and although this episode never found its way into the novel that evolved, the seed of it was born. When my book, Hideous Kinky, was finished, I went back. I’d been too fearful to return before in case the place I’d inhabited did not exist, but when I stepped out into the

La Mamounia Hotel, main; Esther Freud with the waterman, right; Djemaa el-Fna, top right warm spice- and petrol-scented air, all was achingly familiar. I stayed in a small hotel in the Medina, much as we’d lived in as a family, one toilet in the corner of the courtyard, and a tap on the roof where you could wash your clothes. It was not far from the main square – the Djmaa el-Fna, playground of my childhood – and there I found the stalls of oranges and peanuts, the troupes of acrobats, the women who sold their loaves of flat, hard bread. There was the same haunting sound of drums and flutes drifting through the dark, and the poverty, too, was unaltered. Blind men begging, children holding out their hands. It was medieval, marvellous, disturbing, just as it had been.

Now, 30 years from that first return, I am back. I have been a regular visitor in the intervening years, and each time I’ve been struck by the accelerating change – from the new airport (Swiss-designed) that mirrors a traditional brass lantern with its dappling light, to the non hassling law that means you can wander through the souk unbesieged. Marrakech has grown from 600,000 inhabitants in the Nineties to 1.3million, and many residents of the Medina – the ancient walled centre – have seized their chance to sell or rent their family riads and move out to more modern districts.

I, for nostalgic reasons, am back in the Medina, although this time in exquisite luxury at La Sultana, a hotel formed from five interconnecting riads, allowing you to wander from one courtyard to the next, some filled with ferns, others tiled, in one a pale-blue solar-heated pool. It is a traditionally Moroccan hotel, its narrow alley leading into a traditional street – carts of fresh herbs, sardines laid out on the ground, stalls of vegetables, hanging flanks of meat.

A guide escorts me to the Saadian Tombs, the elaborately tiled graves of the dynasty that ruled before the current royal family took power 1,000 years ago. Fattah has been a guide for 40 years, and is full of wisdom and opinion. He, like many Moroccans, is deeply patriotic, and is happy to describe the many innovations of his king. Mohammed VI succeeded his father, the long-reigning Hassan II, 20 years ago, and it has been his job to bring Morocco into the modern world. “We do not have the curse of oil,” Fattah says, and he is proud of the country’s solar energy plant, one of the biggest in the world. Mohammad VI is tackling poverty too, awarding grants (interest-free) to individuals and small businesses, and accepting refugees from war-torn African states, giving them residency and status. “And the women,” he says, “they love him.”

I have read how the king has done much to promote women’s roles in sporting, cultural and political realms, and how his own wife was given a title, named, and photographed, something unheard of for royal wives in Moroccan tradition, although – and this is not mentioned, certainly not by Fattah – he and Princess Lalla Salma are now rumoured to be divorced and she has not been seen in public for several years. Women, in the Medina at least, appear to live traditional lives, in headscarves and djellabas, they sit or walk together with their children, and do not frequent the cafés at the edge of the Djmaa el-Fna thronged exclusively by Moroccan men. Once out of the old city, the atmosphere is different. This visit coincides with the opening of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (the name referencing the number of countries in Africa) and the opening at La Mamounia hotel is glamorous and free-spirited.

Three years ago Morocco joined the African Union and this month, in celebration of that – and of the appointment of Marrakech as the first African City of Culture (for reasons presumably political, now relocated to Rabat) – there began a three-day annual festival of screenings, readings and panel discussions at the Jnane Tamsna Hotel in the Palmeraie – AFreeCulture – hosted by the

The motorbike takes us through the twists and turns of the tanneries

irrepressible Meryanne Loum-Martin. Tourism has also accelerated. “Maybe too much,” Fattah admits as we walk through the tiled state rooms of the Bahia Palace, surrounded by foreigners hoovering up the experience through their phone screens. But February is a popular month, and this winter – with temperatures in the high 20s, the snow-capped mountains of the Atlas barely patched with white – a welcome escape from rain-drenched Britain.

One of the city’s new businesses is the Sadaka Sidecar experience: a dark-green vintage motorbike that comes to the hotel and takes us past the king’s vast palace, along the narrow streets of the Medina, and out through the gate of the tanneries, constructed to repel anyone who might invade, with its quadruple twists and turns. We drive through the Palmeraie, inspect the ancient irrigation system – tunnels that lead to the foot of the Atlas Mountains and draw water into what was once a desert, although, with 18 golf courses, much of the water has been siphoned off, leaving the scattered palms dusty and windswept. We visit Dar El Sadaka, the house of Jean-François Fourtou, where among pampas grass and vegetables he has created distorted visions from his dreams, oversized furniture as seen by a small child, and the House Fallen from the Sky, a cottage turned upside down. On the way back we drive through the less familiar areas of Gueliz and Hivernage, where so many have relocated, where life is less conservative and men, women and tourists sit happily at the same café tables.

I’m most at home in the streets of my childhood. I take a last meander through the souk, buy cumin, turmeric, and verbena tea, indigo paint, and amber to keep away the moths, and as I trek back across the Djmaa el-Fna I see a waterman, dressed in the colours of the Moroccan flag, a tap attached to his leather apron. As I approach I can taste the warm and tinny water stored there, and remember how we’d clamour for a cup. Today I hand over my dirhams in exchange for a photograph, and I wander home to La Sultana where mint tea is poured as it always was, from a great height, and a stork flaps slow across the sky to settle on a neighbouring roof, and as the muezzin calls out the evening prayer I plan how soon I can get back.

Abercrombie & Kent (abercrombie kent.co.uk; 01242 547703) offers a four-night break in Marrakech, staying at La Sultana, from £1,450pp, including flights, private transfers, B&B accommodation, a half-day city tour and Sadaka Sidecar experience.